Probably at that stage of his recovery his mind had reacted more quickly

than his emotions. And by that strange faculty by which an idea often

becomes stronger in memory than in its original production he found

himself in the grip of a passion infinitely more terrible than his

earlier one for her. It wiped out the memory, even the thought, of

Elizabeth, and left him a victim of its associated emotions. Bitter

jealousy racked him, remorse and profound grief. The ten miles of road

to the railroad became ten miles of torture, of increasing domination of

the impulse to go to her, and of final surrender.

In Spokane he outfitted himself, for his clothes were ragged, and with

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the remainder of his money bought a ticket to Chicago. Beyond Chicago he

had no thought save one. Some way, somehow, he must get to New York.

Yet all the time he was fighting. He tried again and again to break

away from the emotional associations from which his memory of her was

erected; when that failed he struggled to face reality; the lapse of

time, the certainty of his disappointment, at the best the inevitable

parting when he went back to Norada. But always in the end he found his

face turned toward the East, and her.

He had no fear of starving. If he had learned the cost of a dollar in

blood and muscle, he had the blood and the muscle. There was a time, in

Chicago, when the necessity of thinking about money irritated him, for

the memory of his old opulent days was very clear. Times when his temper

was uncertain, and he turned surly. Times when his helplessness brought

to his lips the old familiar blasphemies of his youth, which sounded

strange and revolting to his ears.

He had no fear, then, but a great impatience, as though, having lost

so much time, he must advance with every minute. And Chicago drove him

frantic. There came a time there when he made a deliberate attempt

to sink to the very depths, to seek forgetfulness by burying one

wretchedness under another. He attempted to find work and failed, and he

tried to let go and sink. The total result of the experiment was that

he wakened one morning in his lodging-house ill and with his money gone,

save for some small silver. He thought ironically, lying on his untidy

bed, that even the resources of the depths were closed to him.

He never tried that experiment again. He hated himself for it.

For days he haunted the West Madison Street employment agencies. But the

agencies and sidewalks were filled with men who wandered aimlessly

with the objectless shuffle of the unemployed. Beds had gone up in the

lodging-houses to thirty-five cents a night, and the food in the cheap

restaurants was almost uneatable. There came a day when the free morning

coffee at a Bible Rescue Home, and its soup and potatoes and carrots at

night was all he ate.




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